Free Association Reading Series

Join us for an intimate evening of readings with exceptional writers co-curated by Pat Hart and Marc Nieson of the Free Association Reading Series.

Featured Writers:

Peter Trachtenberg is the author of 7 Tattoos (Crown, 1997), The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning (Little Brown, 2008), and Another Insane Devotion (Da Capo, 2012), a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. His essays, journalism, and short fiction have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, BOMB, TriQuarterly, O: The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times Travel Magazine, A Public Space, the L.A. Review of Books, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Guernica and StoryQuarterly. His commentaries have been broadcast on NPR’S All Things Considered. Trachtenberg is an Associate Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh; he also teaches at the Bennington Writers Seminars. He’s the recipient of a NYFA artist’s fellowship, the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, Whiting and Guggenheim fellowships, and residencies at Yaddo and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. The Book of Calamities was given the 2009 Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Award “for scholarly studies that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity.” He lives in Pittsburgh.

Karla Lamb‘s work has appeared in Word Riot, Brooklyn-based A Women’s Thing Magazine, Coal Hill Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Pittsburgh City Paper, Runaway Hotel, and Voices from the Attic Vol. XIX. Lamb has an MFA in poetry from Carlow University’s Creative Writing program, and is currently working on her full length poetry manuscript. Lamb lives in Pittsburgh, PA where she works as a project manager for City of Asylum, an organization that provides sanctuary to endangered writers. She has edited for After Happy Hour Review, and can usually be found collaborating with various artists and writers in Pittsburgh, PA.

Hyunho Yoon is originally from South Korea and currently lives in Pittsburgh. He is a student of creative writing and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, where he edits The Oakland Review, the university’s literary and arts journal. He has won the Academy of American Poets College Prize and CMU’s Adamson Student Writing Award for Fiction for his writing. He is now working on a project titled The Apologist S, a novel about language, memory, and distortion, set in a fictional East Asian country of the near future. He will be attending medical school after graduation, and is excited for a career as a humanitarian physician-writer.

Robin Clarke writes poetry and nonfiction and teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh, where she has been involved in organizing a faculty union. Her first book, Lines The Quarry(Omnidawn, 2013), won the Omnidawn 1st/2nd book prize for poetry, and she is also the co-author, with Sten Carlson, of the chapbook Lives of the Czars (nonpolygon, 2011). She is currently pursuing her MSW in order to practice psychotherapy. She lives with her partner, Joshua Zelesnick, and their daughters Charlotte and Violet, in an intentional community of gardeners, activists, peacemakers, and healers.

Curators:

Pat Hart, co-curator
Marc Nieson, co-curator

Pat Hart writes plays, monologues, short stories, and novels. Playwriting credits include “Book Wench” a one-act play, performed at the Strawberry One-Act Festival, Summer 2015, New York, New York and Murderous, a 10-minute monologue, performed at Practice Monologamy, Carlow University, September 2015. Published short stories include “The Vigil,” The Writing Disorder (Fall 2015), “New Wife vs. Old Wife, a love story,” (2015) and “Dragon Boogers” novel excerpt (2016) in Voices in the Attic, and “Spider Ball,” Rune (May 2015). Pat has a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh and is the founder of Free Association, a reading series for established and emerging writers in Pittsburgh. She is currently working on a novel set in Pittsburgh and Burma during the 1920s.

Marc Nieson is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and NYU Film School. His background includes children’s theatre, cattle chores, and a season with a one-ring circus. His memoir, SCHOOLHOUSE: Lessons on Love & Landscape, came out from Ice Cube Press in 2016. He’s won a Raymond Carver Short Story Award, Pushcart Prize nominations, and been noted in Best American Essays. He teaches at Chatham University, edits The Fourth River, and is at work on a new novel, HOUDINI’S HEIRS.